xXx tried, and failed, to make James Bond irrelevant

by Nathan Rabin

Forgotbusters re-examines movies that were among the top 25 grossing films the year of their release, but have receded culturally, in order to explore what originally attracted audiences to them, and why they failed to endure.

For more than half a century, James Bond has been good enough. In fact, he’s been more than good enough: He’s been the gold standard for dashing, continental secret agents. Every other secret-agent series has been doomed to live in Bond’s outsized, impeccably styled shadow, even those starring such hep cats as Frank Sinatra (the Tony Rome series), James Coburn (Our Man Flint and its follow-ups), and Dean Martin (the Matt Helm series). In pop culture, you can’t get any cooler or more iconic than Sinatra—unless you’re James Bond.

But sometime around the turn of the last century, Sony determined that, contrary to popular opinion, James Bond was no longer good enough. Previous generations might have thought he was somehow cool, with his gadgets, women, tuxedos, and droll bons mot, but for the current generation of Mountain Dew-chugging, bungee-jumping, fire-breathing extreme-sports maniacs, James Bond was insufficient. Though granny might have thought Sean Connery as Bond was “hep,” the character had never known the loving, burning touch of a tattooist’s needle. James Bond certainly did not have his logo tattooed across the back of his neck, nor did he ever film videos where he drove a Corvette off a bridge while making a bold stand for videogames and violent rap music. James Bond was a boring old spy, not an extreme-sports superstar with shadowy links to the underground and potentially illegal websites. Could he be any more of a tired anachronism?

In other words, James Bond did not behave like a stupid, pandering cartoon of X Games culture, a Poochie conception of what the kids want out of a totally extreme, in-your-face secret agent. He didn’t have to, because he was James Bond, and it would have been beneath his dignity to behave like such a Red Bull-addled stooge.

In that respect, 2002 was a fascinating transitional year for the secret-agent genre. The king, as always, was James Bond: Die Another Day, while nobody’s favorite Bond film, ranked 12th at the domestic box office and sixth at the international box office, with a worldwide gross well above $400 million. Sony’s totally extreme new breed of secret-agent movie, xXx, also had a strong showing, with an international gross above $275 million, landing it at 14th on that year’s international box-office rankings. But the film that actually accomplished what xXx set out to do—create the next generation of secret agent, with a style and sensibility that connects deeply to contemporary audiences—actually trailed behind xXx at the box office. If there was a passing of the secret-agent torch in 2002, it was not from sad, old, pathetically non-tattooed, insufficiently extreme James Bond to xXx’s young, “hip,” crazily tattooed Xander Cage. No, it was from James Bond to Jason Bourne, the amnesiac hero of 2002’s The Bourne Identity.

Though both lineages can be traced back to James Bond, xXx and The Bourne Identity are otherwise opposites. The Bourne Identity made the spy genre adult; xXx transformed the adolescent fantasies of James Bond into the pre-adolescent fantasies of little boys obsessed with cars, muscles, and explosions. xXx loudly broadcasts its attitude and awesomeness in ways that instantly become oppressive and obnoxious; The Bourne Identity goes about its business with sober-minded intensity and an unerring sense of craft. xXx spends its running time trying to shove its juvenile conception of awesomeness down viewers’ throats; The Bourne Identity respects its audience’s intelligence. Also: The Bourne Identity did not feel the need to metaphorically kill James Bond in its opening.

xXx begins with a Bond-like agent in expensive clothes being pursued by anonymous henchmen through a city street. In a bid to escape, he stumbles upon a Rammstein concert so badass that one of the performers shoots fire at the audience during the show. Real fire! This is clearly too much extremeness and attitude for this namby-pamby secret agent to endure. So he ends up dead, his corpse being obliviously passed along the crowd as a form of posthumous crowd-surfing. The implication is clear: James Bond, or at least a James Bond proxy, can’t handle a world this extreme, this intense, this in-your-face. The prospect of crowd-surfing atop so many tattooed, pierced, multicultural souls—all listening to loud music at the same time—would have sent James Bond into a panic attack. He’s probably lucky he ended up dead mere moments after encountering such a frightfully intense scenario.

For the sort of hero xXx has in mind, the problem with the above scenario isn’t that it’s too extreme—it’s that it isn’t extreme enough. If such a hero were there, he’d be shooting a flamethrower back at Rammstein. Then he’d stomp all their faces in, just for a larf. And for them, being stomped on would be an incredible honor.

And so the film introduces Xander Cage, in a way the filmmakers clearly hope says everything about the character and the film. Unfortunately, it does. The sequence begins at an elitist country club with a snooty, racist, extreme-sports-hating politician (he even has a “Skateboarding IS a Crime” bumper sticker) handing the keys to his red Corvette convertible to a mysterious man with “xXx” tattooed on the back of his neck.

But instead of valeting the gentleman’s car, this tattooed, rebellious figure roars out of the country club at top speed and finds his associates at a predetermined meeting place. They strap recording devices and small Sony video cameras throughout the car so that, while being pursued by the police, Xander can make a viral video in which he addresses the Sony cameras directly, stiffly intoning:

These monkeys are following me because I just took this car. Obviously the car doesn’t belong to me. It’s not my style. It belongs to Dick. Dick Hotchkiss, the California state senator. You remember Dick. He’s the guy who tried to ban rap music because he feels that the lyrics promote violence. It’s music, Dick! He’s also the guy who wants to pull every videogame off every shelf in the country. Because he feels that the videogames diminish the intelligence of our youth. C’mon, Dick. It’s the only education we got. Dick, you’re a bad man. You know what we do to bad men? We punish them. Dick, you’ve just entered the Xander Zone.

After uttering what is apparently his catchphrase, Xander rides the Corvette off a bridge using a ramp, then parachutes out of the car before it explodes, delivering one final bon mot for the camera as he glides down elegantly: “The moral is, don’t be a dick, DICK.”

From a stunt perspective, it’s a hell of a sequence: A man seamlessly races a car off a bridge, then parachutes to safety hundreds of feet below while the cops can only look on in disgust as he floats away. From a storytelling perspective, however, it couldn’t be less effective. xXx needs us to believe in Xander’s inveterate, world-class awesomeness, yet the film introduces its hero by having him stiffly perform the world’s worst YouTube editorial, a mealy-mouthed, torturously written little spiel that derives all of its comedic punch from the fact that “Dick” is both a shortened version of Richard, the politician’s name, and a euphemism for male genitalia. This is the guy who’s supposed to be cooler than James Bond? This is the guy we’re expected to not only root for, but also admire? This is the man who inspires hero worship in everyone around him, even his ostensible peers?

Xander rides a motorcycle back to a giant loft where a party is in full swing, where he’s accosted by a sexy stranger who insists that a world-class athlete of his stature deserves a videogame of his own. This brings down the wrath of Xander’s friend, co-worker, and possible employer J.J. (Eve), who gets in the stranger’s face and tells her, “You know [Xander is] never going to sell out, right? That’s why he is who he is.”

J.J. runs an underground website that apparently makes money by showing illegal videos of super-famous athletes committing crimes in the name of the public good, a proposition that raises a host of questions. Is Xander’s full-time job taping himself doing illegal things for public consumption? Or was the bridge stunt a one-time proposition, and he earns his livelihood elsewhere? Does he have a sponsorship, or does he compete for prize money, or is he so fucking amazing that people just hand him fistfuls of cash for being who he is? And for a man whose defining feature is that he will never sell out, isn’t Xander, with his self-referencing catchphrase, neck tattoo of his logo, and love of small but dependable Sony electronics, a little obsessed with branding? It’s almost as if this pandering piece of corporate product isn’t as subversive as it professes to be.

Xander’s world-class badassery brings him to the attention of Agent Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), a severely burned, top-level government operative who runs a program that recruits criminals and totally in-your-face rebels to go on government missions because they are, in his words, “Programmable, expendable, and they work.” Gibbons’ logic is impeccable: Is there anyone more programmable than people specifically sought out for their hatred for authority and contempt for rules? Clearly these violent, anti-authoritarian lunatics are the perfect people to serve as government stooges.

To test Xander, Gibbons has him abducted and knocked out, then dropped in a phony diner where a hold-up occurs, which Xander instantly recognizes as both phony and a test. He passes the test, and then he’s dropped off in an unnamed land and confronted with a machete-wielding El Jefe (Danny Trejo, naturally enough). Xander wrongly assumes this is a test as well, so he does not take it seriously, and instead spends his time insulting El Jefe and his henchmen.

xXx was written by Rich Wilkes, the screenwriter of The Jerky Boys, which may not seem germane, except that xXx makes Xander the world’s most muscle-bound insult comedian. When El Jefe angrily asks Xander for information, he simply smirks and quips, “You’re short and my friend says you could use a haircut to update your style.” When they threaten to torture Xander and his cohorts, he retorts, “What? Hogtie us and force us to listen to your bad accent?” When a henchmen threatens to shoot him, he responds with his signature smirk and, “If you’re going to shoot anybody, shoot the monkey who sold you that suit.” Insulting people’s haircuts and jackets. The man truly is extreme.

The film’s wordplay is just as torturous and convoluted as these quips. When Russian femme fatale (and fellow undercover agent) Yelena (Asia Argento) insults Xander by suggesting he might need some ice for his head after thinking too hard, he responds with, “Ice? Yeah, you could chisel some off of your heart. If you can find it.” xXx was supposed to make Vin Diesel the next Schwarzenegger, but he seems to have skipped from the The Terminator directly to the Batman & Robin stage of his career, ice-themed wordplay included.

xXx then dispatches Xander to Eastern Europe to fight the forces of Anarchy 99, which is not a perennial Warped Tour fixture, as its name suggests, but rather a dangerous Russian terrorist collective named after the number of people it killed its first night in business. Anarchy 99 does its sinister business at the sort of flashy parties that are ubiquitous in bad action movies like this one, where women in bikinis splash champagne on their breasts for no discernible reason, while men wearing heavy jackets and holding machine guns lurk in the background.

xXx is only ever impressive when it stops trying to blow audiences away with its attitude, humor, and hipness (none of which it actually possesses, let alone in the quantities it imagines) and acquits itself with stunts and large-scale action setpieces. Director Rob Cohen, coming off the Diesel-starring The Fast And The Furious, is adept at orchestrating old-school action. The problem is that what’s new and distinctive about xXx is also what makes it terrible (and also dated in a way that’s not much fun), and what isn’t terrible about xXx isn’t all new or distinctive.

I assumed xXx had been created specifically for Diesel (who also executive-produced), to capitalize on the intense heat of his star-making performances in Pitch Black and The Fast And The Furious. So I was surprised to learn that Eric Bana was reportedly the original choice for the lead. Bana played the Incredible Hulk (or at least his alter-ego) as a sober, tragic man of science, so I would like to think he was too dignified to play a man who’s essentially a sentient Mountain Dew commercial. Which led me to wonder if anyone could have convincingly played Xander Cage. Could a young Steve McQueen have pulled it off? A more buff Ryan Gosling? A similarly muscle-bound Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or a young Arnold Schwarzenegger? I suspect each of them would have done a better job as Xander Cage (hell, I’ll throw Eric Bana into that category as well) than Diesel, but the problem is as much with the role as the actor playing him.

xXx is such a misconceived project that Diesel is miscast even in a role that seems custom-made for him. xXx wants us to believe Xander Cage is the coolest guy ever; instead, Diesel comes off like a smug, smirking goober. Diesel lacks the self-deprecating quality Schwarzenegger and Johnson bring to their roles, that sense that they understand just how ridiculous their movies are, but that viewers who play ball will have a lot of fun. Instead, Diesel commits to every stupid joke and painful injection of “attitude” with clumsy, marble-mouthed sincerity that almost evokes pity.

xXx was supposed to play to Diesel’s strengths as a badass. Instead, the gulf between who the character was supposed to be (the new James Bond, only a million times cooler) and who he actually was revealed Diesel’s limitations, as both an actor and a movie star. So even though xXx was in many ways a huge success—it made a fortune at the box office, prompted a sequel starring Ice Cube, and may soon birth a second sequel that would return Diesel to the series—it still feels like a failure. That’s partly the fault of a hype machine that began before the screenplay had even been written, with Sony taking out a billboard with just the film’s title. The stakes for xXx were so high that unless it was the next James Bond, it would be considered a disappointment. Ironically, the successor to James Bond did make his presence felt on the big screen in 2002. Unfortunately for Sony and the painfully overmatched Diesel, Bond’s spiritual heir went by the name of Bourne—Jason Bourne—and not Xander Cage.